Indie Android dev showcases Adobe AIR games

Indie developer Josh Tynjala is showcasing two games – Chroma Circuit and Qrossfire – that were designed using an early build of Adobe AIR for Android.

“Since I’ve only been targeting a single platform so far, I hadn’t yet spent a lot of effort making my games resolution independent,” explained Tynjala.

“With each one, I had to spend a couple hours making adjustments to ensure that the layouts would properly fit the screens of different devices.”

However, Tynjala noted that new code was not Android-specific.

“In fact, now that my games have these changes in place, I shouldn’t need to make any adjustments when Adobe brings AIR to other types of smartphones in the future. That’s awesome.

“Of course, if a platform has an important UI paradigm, like Android’s hardware back button, then yes, I’ll make the necessary tweaks to ensure it is supported.”

According to Tynjala, AIR for Android is capable of rendering significantly faster performance than Adobe’s Packager for iPhone in Flash CS5.

“When I was making iPhone apps with Adobe’s Packager for iPhone in Flash CS5, I had to make heavy use of hardware acceleration to make even the most basic animations run smoothly.

“[But] on Android, my games are all rendering in software, and they feel no less responsive on the phones than they do on my desktop.”